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Hermes, lover of Persephone and Aphrodite, protector of Perseus and Hercules, was the father of all ambassadors. God of gambling, trade and profit, he traversed the earth like a breath of wind, carrying Zeus’s messages, shepherding all travellers, escorting souls to the underworld. He would announce the weddings of the gods and execute their punishments, binding fire-thieving Prometheus to Mount Caucasus with iron spikes. He would visit all the communities of man to offer rewards for the return of Psyche, Aphrodite’s errant handmaiden: ‘seven sweet kisses’ from the goddess herself ‘and a particularly honeyed one imparted with the thrust of her caressing tongue’. Ancient heralds, aspiring to his eloquence and cunning, would claim to be his offspring. They would carry his caduceus, his serpent-entwined staff, and it would grant them safe passage. Earnest and yet mischievous – stealing Apollo’s cattle on the very day he was born – Hermes was to be the ambassadors’ archetype and paragon.
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The caprices of diplomacy in classical Greece often demanded the talents of a Hermes. In southern Europe, Greece had enjoyed something of a resurgence from as early as the eighth century BC. New cities had sprung up, literacy and architecture had blossomed; colonies had been established throughout the Mediterranean, as well as along the coasts of North Africa and the Black Sea. Political life was rooted in the polis, the proud, fiercely independent city state. There was much that united the hundreds of communities across the Greek world – ties of religion, of kinship and, above all, of language – but there was just as much that divided them. The mightiest states – Athens, Corinth, Thebes and Sparta – were inevitable rivals, and while ancient Greece was not quite a theatre of constant war (as is sometimes supposed) it was most certainly a place of shifting leagues, squabbles and intrigue. The states were often willing to unite in the face of a common enemy – most often the Persian Empire – but diplomacy was just as likely to be concerned with territorial disputes, jurisdictional squabbles or cultural rivalry. It was fertile soil for the exploits of ambassadors. As so often, political rivalries and tensions provided the spark for diplomatic endeavour.
In the fifth century BC, Athens had led resistance to the threat of Persian invasion and won famous victories at Marathon (490) and Salamis (480). She could now claim not only cultural superiority (it was the age of Euripides and Sophocles) but ever-expanding dominion. Her leaders could be boastful. Pericles (495–429 BC) declared: ‘Mighty indeed are the marks and monuments of our empire which we have left. Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now. We do not need the praises of a Homer…for our adventurous spirit has forced an entry into every sea and into every land; and everywhere we have left behind us everlasting memorials of good done to our friends, and of suffering inflicted on our enemies.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Here was a rare example of a politician’s swagger being both justified and prescient.
Athenian hegemony was offensive to her rivals. One of the sacred tasks of Greek diplomacy had always been to prevent any one city from becoming unduly powerful. While the comparison may be clumsy and anachronistic, the situation bore some resemblance to that of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Europe, when nations began to strive for a balance of power. Just as the great European states would frown at the pugnacity of Louis XIV’s France so, centuries earlier, the Greeks had acted upon their resentment of Athens and, led by the Spartans, inaugurated the great Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). By its end, Athens’ dominance had been shattered and her empire all but dismantled. The city states of Greece embarked upon yet more decades of destructive feuding, marked by periods of Spartan and then Theban dominance, but most of all by political chaos.
To the north, in 359 BC, Philip II ascended to the throne of Macedon. With consummate timing (peppered with bribery and assassination) he set about spreading Macedonian influence across a confused, divided Greece, conquering lands and amassing tributaries (many of them former Athenian allies). It was now the turn of Athens to grumble at the rise of an overambitious rival, and it fell to Demosthenes, the greatest orator of antiquity, to articulate his city’s mounting trepidation.
In a speech before the senate in 351 BC, Demosthenes lambasted the arrogance of Philip II, and the indolence of the Athenians who sat inactive as Philip was ‘casting his net around us’. He was now ‘drunk with the magnitude of his achievements and dreams of further triumphs when, elated by his success, he sees that there is none to bar his way’.
Demosthenes had a simple solution: Athens should recall its glorious past, cast off the marks of infamy and cowardice and raise new and mightier armies to fend off the Macedonian assault.
(#litres_trial_promo) Many of his fellow Athenians were less hawkish. They thought it wiser to negotiate with Philip, and so it was that Demosthenes found himself a reluctant member of an embassy to Macedonia in 346 BC.
Athenian diplomacy was remarkably transparent. Tactics were debated in political assemblies before embassies actually set out, and negotiations (usually a series of set speeches and replies) were generally conducted in public meetings, although, as so often in the history of diplomacy, it was common for more private discussions between ambassadors and ministers to carry on behind the scenes. If agreement was reached there would be a formal exchange of oaths, and terms would be engraved on stone tablets. If the news was especially important, copies of such tablets would be displayed beyond the territories of the states most directly involved. After Athens and Sparta reached an accord in 421 BC, copies of the treaty were set up at both Olympia and Delphi.
Given its importance, Greek diplomacy was astonishingly extemporaneous. There was no notion of a distinct arm of government dedicated to foreign affairs, nor of a permanent diplomatic establishment. Men were simply chosen for ambassadorial errands – usually bearing the title of angelos (messenger) or presbeis (envoy or elder) – as and when the need arose. There was scant financial reward, and envoys – typically drawn (as in many cultures) from the political classes – were obliged to bear all the expenses of their retinues, although service as an ambassador did tend to enhance a politician’s reputation. There were few successful Athenian statesmen who had not, at one time or another, carried out diplomatic missions. Demosthenes, by the end of his career, would be a veteran of missions to Thebes and the Peloponnese as well as to Macedon.
Greek diplomacy was also riddled with dissent. Unwilling to trust important errands to individuals, Athens generally favoured the larger embassy, of three, five or ten men. Although envoys were furnished with specific, detailed instructions, the potential for bickering between them was a perennial danger. Within the embassy of 346 BC, Demosthenes was predictably hostile to Philip, insisting that any agreement with Macedon would have to be in the Athenians’ best interests; stringent conditions would have to be met before any treaty could be ratified. Some of his colleagues, notably the orator Aeschines, were more sympathetic to the Macedonian cause, and Demosthenes believed they were willing to give way on too many important points of negotiation. Some sources report that the rival factions even refused to sleep under the same roof during their journey. Upon returning to Athens, a furious Demosthenes charged some of his fellow ambassadors with receiving bribes from the Macedonian king.
One of the accused, Aeschines, sought to counter this threat by launching his own attack on the man expected to lead the prosecution: the politician Timarchus. If he could damage Timarchus’s reputation sufficiently, then Aeschines’ own trial would, at the very least, be postponed. Aeschines opted for a spectacular strategy, accusing Timarchus of having been a gay prostitute. One of the most sensational jury trials in the ancient world would reveal, all at once, how seriously the Greeks took the business of embassy, and just how vulnerable their diplomacy was to the selfish machinations of individual ambassadors. Beyond all that, it furnished an extraordinarily intimate example of an ancient ambassador desperately struggling for political survival.
ii. The Trial of Timarchus
The workings of Athenian justice, if we are to believe the comic playwright Aristophanes, were dangerously addictive. His scurrilous play The Wasps tells the story of Philocleon, who spends all his days serving on juries. He revels in the authority this bestows, enjoying the pathetic spectacle of defendants pleading for mercy ‘Is there any creature on earth more blessed, more feared and petted from day to day, or that leads a happier, pleasanter life’ than a juror, he asks? Some defendants ‘vow they are needy…and over their poverty wail and whine, some tell us a legend of days gone by, or a joke from Aesop…to make me laugh, that so I may doff my terrible rage.’ And when the ‘piteous bleating’ is over, he can return home ‘with my fee in my wallet’, to be greeted by his doting daughter and ‘my dear little wife [who] sets on the board nice manchets of bread in a tempting array’.
His son Bdelycleon fears for Philocleon’s sanity and locks him in the family home. His fellow jurors, dressed as a chorus of wasps, stage a rescue attempt and, although Bdelycleon manages to rout them in a debate, Philocleon’s addiction is not so easy defeated. To ease his father’s discomfort, Bdelycleon sets up a makeshift court and, for want of any human reprobates, the family dog is brought to trial for stealing a piece of Sicilian cheese. The creature is only saved by some trickery on Bdelycleon’s part, whereby Philocleon unwittingly votes for acquittal. Devastated – he had never previously found a defendant not guilty – Philocleon ends the play by getting hopelessly drunk.
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The reality of Greek jurisprudence was rather more decorous, but Aristophanes had one thing exactly right: Athenian juries were gloriously powerful. In an attempt to check bribery, they were made up of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of members, drawn by lot. Even the wealthiest citizen, so it was supposed, lacked the resources to corrupt that many individuals. At trial, a water-clock was set in motion, and defendants and plaintiffs – who habitually represented themselves – would both make lengthy speeches, cite the relevant laws, and call their witnesses. There was no judge (as we would understand the term) to coordinate proceedings, monitor objections, or offer summations. Success rested solely on whether or not a speaker had been persuasive; eloquence was everything.
A jury’s verdict was final and there was no room for appeal. Jurors, who had to be over thirty years of age and free from any outstanding financial debt to the state, were chosen from a list of 6,000 candidates, drawn up at the beginning of each year. They received a small daily stipend for their service and they knew, and revelled in, their own power. As the trial of Timarchus would demonstrate, the linchpins of any competent legal strategy were to flatter a jury, to appeal to its patriotism, and to avoid the heckling in which jurors regularly indulged.
‘Fellow citizens,’ the embattled ambassador Aeschines began, ‘I have never brought indictment against any Athenian.’ However, ‘when I saw that the city was being seriously injured by the defendant, Timarchus, who, though disqualified by law, was speaking in your assemblies, and when I myself was made a victim of his blackmailing attack’, he had been compelled to act. ‘I decided that it would be a most shameful thing if I failed to come to the defence of the whole city and its laws, and to your defence and my own.’ It was an irresistible opening salvo.
The city’s lawgivers, Aeschines explained, had been unflinching when they had established who might engage in public debate and hold civic office. There had been no attempts to ‘exclude from the platform the man whose ancestors have not held a general’s office, nor even the man who earns his daily bread by working at a trade’. Such citizens were welcome to participate. Nevertheless, the same privilege did not extend to the man who ‘beats his father or mother, or fails to support them or to provide a home for them’, nor to the man who had failed to perform military service and ‘thrown away his shield’.
Nor did Athens tolerate the individual who ‘because of his shameful private life the laws forbids from speaking before the people’. The city’s constitution was clear. ‘If any Athenian…shall have prostituted his person, he shall not be permitted to become one of the nine archons [chief magistrates of Athens]…nor to discharge the office of priest…nor shall he act as an advocate for the state…nor shall ever hold any office whatsoever…nor shall he be a herald or an ambassador.’ Aeschines intended to prove that Timarchus was just such a man, unworthy of holding office, and entirely disqualified from directing a legal proceeding.
Timarchus’s profligacy had apparently begun early in life. ‘As soon as he was past boyhood he settled down in Piraeus [the port of Athens] at the establishment of Euthydicus the physician, pretending to be a student of medicine, but in fact deliberately offering himself for sale.’ Aeschines next turned his attention to Misgolas, ‘a man otherwise honourable, and beyond reproach’, aside for his penchant for male prostitutes. He had always been ‘accustomed to have about him singers or cithara-players’ and, learning that Timarchus was ‘well-developed, young and lewd’, he paid him a handsome sum of money to come and live with him. He was ‘just the person for the thing that Misgolas wanted to do, and Timarchus wanted to have done’.
The most damning proof of Timarchus’s guilt had been his unwavering ability to live far beyond his means. Certainly, he had once had wealth, but this had quickly vanished. He had sold his house, south of the Acropolis, to the comic poet Nausicrates, and had disposed of his country estates and slaves. Yet he had still been able to enjoy ‘costly suppers’ and maintain ‘the most expensive flute-girls and harlots’. ‘Does it take a wizard to explain all that?’ Aeschines asked. Other men were obviously paying for Timarchus’ excesses, and it was ‘perfectly plain that the man who makes such demands must himself be furnishing in return certain pleasures to the men who are spending their money on him’.
Aeschines insisted that he was not launching an assault on the beauty of young men. All fathers hoped for sons who were ‘fair and beautiful in person, and worthy of the city’. To be a pretty young boy was not the same thing as being a whore. Nor was Aeschines a stranger to love. As he warned the jury, his opposing counsel would doubtless remind them that Aeschines himself had sometimes ‘made a nuisance of myself in the gymnasia and…been many times a lover’. He might even offer extracts from all ‘the erotic poems I have ever addressed to one person or another’.
Such a strategy would, Aeschines concluded, be foolish: ‘as for me, I neither find fault with love that is honourable, nor do I say that those who surpass in beauty are prostitutes. I do not deny that I myself have been a lover and am a lover to this day.’ Love was one thing; love between men was another; but sex offered in return for monetary reward was altogether different, and it did not befit the leaders of Athens.
Each juror placed his pebble in the appropriate urn (one to condemn, the other to acquit). Timarchus was found guilty, reducing his career to tatters. The defence, mounted by Demosthenes, is lost to us. So too is any possibility of deciphering which of the charges levelled by Aeschines were justified. Nonetheless, the spectacle of an ambassador fighting for his political life still resonates down the ages. More poignantly, and not least by virtue of its grubbiness, the trial of Timarchus also seems to encapsulate the decline of Athenian grandeur and influence. A mighty power had entered its dotage.
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Three years later, in 343 BC, Demosthenes would finally bring his original case against Aeschines, charging him with corruption during the embassy to Macedonia. Demosthenes realized just how sensational the trial had become. ‘I do not doubt,’ he told the jurors, ‘that you are all pretty well aware that this trial has been the centre of keen partisanship and active canvassing, for you saw the people who were accosting and annoying you just now at the casting of lots.’
They must not be swayed by such distractions, however. Aeschines was ‘trying to introduce into politics a most dangerous and deplorable practice’. He had been criticized and so he had turned his fire on Timarchus. This was a horrendous precedent, ‘for if a man who has undertaken and administered any public function can get rid of accusers not by his honesty but by the fear he inspires, the people will soon lose all control of public affairs’.
There could be little doubt about Aeschines’ guilt, Demosthenes suggested, and all the jurors had to do was call to mind the duties that any ambassador was expected to fulfil. ‘He is responsible, in the first place, for the reports he has made; secondly, for the advice he has offered; thirdly, for his observance of your instructions; and, to crown all, whether he has done his business corruptly or with integrity.’ Measured against this standard, Aeschines had been an abject failure.
There had been a time, Demosthenes reminded the jury, when Aeschines had been among Philip’s harshest critics, making speeches against him and organizing conferences where the Greek states could formulate a united response to the Macedonian threat. But, in an instant, that had all changed. After an earlier mission to Philip’s court, Aeschines had suddenly lent his support to a peace treaty with Macedon that was patently injurious to Athenian interests. After his earlier patriotism he began using language ‘for which, as heaven is my witness, he deserves to die many times over. He told you that you ought to forget the achievements of your forefathers; that you should not tolerate all that talk about old trophies and sea-fights.’ The only possible explanation for such a volte-face was that Aeschines had been bribed by the Macedonian regime, and as an Athenian jury was well aware bribery was one of the heartbeats of Greek political life.
A second embassy – the embassy that had provoked the trial of Timarchus – had been despatched to Philip with the aim of ratifying that peace treaty but it had failed to secure all of the conditions and provisos that the Athenian assembly had insisted upon. A deeply unsatisfactory treaty had been agreed and Aeschines was solely to blame. This is what Demosthenes had told the assembly upon his return to Athens, but he added that it had been hoodwinked by Aeschines’s eloquence. The ambassador had offered no report, given no reply to the charges levelled by Demosthenes, ‘but he made such a fine speech, so full of big promises, that he carried you all away with him’. Through his efforts, Aeschines boasted, Philip had been entirely won over to the Athenian cause and would now be a valued ally.
This was hardly how Demosthenes remembered the embassy, so ‘I rose, and said that the whole story was news to me. I attempted to repeat the statement I had made to the council, but Aeschines and Philocrates posted themselves one on either side of me, shouting, interrupting, and finally jeering. You were all laughing; you would not listen to me, and you did not want to believe anything except what Aeschines had reported.’
A dishonourable peace had been secured and Philip of Macedon’s ascendancy had continued unchecked. ‘Men of Athens,’ Demosthenes suggested, ‘nothing more awful or more momentous has befallen Greece within living memory, nor, as I believe, in all the history of the past.’ Athens had been duped by Philip of Macedon, a man who ‘has many claims to congratulation on his good fortune…Such achievements as the capture of great cities and the subjugation of a vast territory are, I suppose, enviable, as they are undoubtedly imposing; yet we could mention many other men who have done the like.’ But his ‘greatest stroke of good fortune…is that, when he needed scoundrels for his purposes, he found bigger scoundrels than he wanted’. He had found Aeschines, who had not been cajoled into treachery but ‘had sold himself, and pocketed the money, before he made his speech and betrayed us to Philip. To Philip he has been a trusty and well-beloved hireling; to you a treacherous ambassador and a treacherous citizen, worthy of threefold destruction.’
It was not too late to make amends, however. ‘Today you are not merely adjudging this case. You are legislating for all future time, whether every ambassador is basely to serve your enemies for hire, or without fee or bribe to give his best service to you.’ Philip could be warned that ‘he will have to remodel his methods’ when dealing with Athens. ‘At present his chosen policy is to cheat the many and court the few; but, when he learns that his favourites have been brought to ruin, he will wish for the future to deal with the many, who are the real masters of our state…For the sake of your honour, of your religion, of your security, of everything you value,’ Demosthenes implored the jury, ‘you must not acquit this man. Visit him with exemplary punishment, and let his fate be a warning not to our own citizens alone but to every man who lives in the Hellenic world.’
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It was rousing stuff, but Aeschines had prepared a compelling story of his own. From the outset he threw himself on the jury’s mercy. ‘I beg you, fellow citizens, to hear me with willing and friendly mind, remembering how great is my peril, and how many the charges against which I have to defend myself; remembering also the arts and devices of my accuser.’ This Demosthenes was hardly the most attractive of personalities, after all, Aeschines reminded the jury.
During the embassy to Philip he had been little more than a nuisance: ‘All the way we were forced to put up with Demosthenes’ odious and insufferable ways.’ That was as nothing when compared with his boastfulness, ‘the over-weening self-confidence of this fellow’. When the ambassadors were discussing their tactics, one of them had ‘remarked that he was afraid Philip would get the better of us in arguing his claims’. Demosthenes immediately ‘promised fountains of oratory, and said that he was going to make such a speech…that he would sew up Philip’s mouth as with an un-soaked rush’. Sadly, as Aeschines remembered it, events turned out rather differently.
When Demosthenes’ turn came to address Philip,
all were intent, expecting to hear a masterpiece of eloquence. For, as we learned afterwards, his extravagant boasting had been reported to Philip and his court. So when all were thus prepared to listen, this creature mouthed forth a proem [an introduction] – an obscure sort of thing and as dead as fright could make it – and getting on a little way into the subject he suddenly stopped speaking and stood helpless. Finally he collapsed completely.
Philip saw Demosthenes’s plight and generously assured him that his faltering speech was not an ‘irreparable calamity’. He was an ambassador, not an actor on the stage. He should calm himself and ‘try gradually to recall his speech, and speak it off as he had prepared it’. Unfortunately, ‘having been once upset, and having forgotten what he had written, he was unable to recover himself…and broke down again.’ Philip was deeply embarrassed and a herald ordered the ambassadors to withdraw. Demosthenes was mortified, at which point his sour feelings towards the entire embassy began to fester. To deflect attention away from his own risible performance, he suddenly began accusing the other ambassadors of negotiating against the best interests of Athens.
Through the rest of the ambassadors’ stay in Macedon, Demosthenes oscillated between showering Philip in fawning speeches and behaving ‘with shameless rudeness’ whenever he was invited to dinner. On the journey home his mood did seem to brighten. ‘Suddenly he began talking to each of us in a surprisingly friendly manner,’ promising to lend his support to their political careers and even praising Aeschines’s oratorical skills. One evening, ‘when we were all dining together at Larisa, he made fun of himself and the embarrassment which had come upon him in his speech, and he declared that Philip was the most wonderful man under the sun’. It was a ruse, however, an attempt to make the other ambassadors say complimentary things about Philip that he could later use as proof of their treachery.
Demosthenes had never been the warmest supporter of a peace treaty with Philip, and his experiences in Macedonia had only brought him humiliation. He was levelling charges of corruption, Aeschines suggested, as a political strategy, to rouse Athens against Philip of Macedon, and as a petulant gesture of revenge. Aeschines allowed that ‘the peace failed to please some of our public men’, but ‘ought they not to have opposed it at the time, instead of putting me on trial now?…They say that Philip bought the peace, that he overreached us at every point in the articles of agreement, and that the peace which he contrived for his own interests, he himself has violated.’ Aeschines disputed this analysis but, regardless, it seemed unfair to him that ‘although I was but one of ten ambassadors, I alone am made to give account.’
Finally, Aeschines invited the jurors to look around the courtroom. ‘Yonder is my father, Atrometus. There are few older men among all the citizens, for he is now ninety-four years old. When he was a young man, before the war destroyed his property, he was so fortunate as to be an athlete. Banished by the Thirty [Athens’ oligarchic governing body after the Peloponnesian War], he served as a soldier in Asia, and in danger he showed himself a man.’ Then there was his mother, a woman of extraordinary courage, who had followed her husband into exile and shared in his disasters.
Aeschines was portraying himself as the child of proud Athenian parents: ‘I myself, gentlemen, have three children, one daughter and two sons, by the daughter of Philodemus, the sister of Philon and Epicrates.’ He had brought them into court with the other family members ‘for the sake of asking one question and presenting one piece of evidence to the jury’.
For I ask, fellow citizens, whether you believe that I would have betrayed to Philip, not only my country, my personal friendships, and my rights in the shrines and tombs of my fathers, but also these children, the dearest of mankind to me. Do you believe that I would have held his friendship more precious than the safety of these children? By what lust have you seen me conquered? What unworthy act have I ever done for money? It is not Macedon that makes men good or bad, but their own inborn nature; and we have not come back from the embassy changed men, but the same men that you yourselves sent out.
‘With all loyalty I have served the city as her ambassador,’ Aeschines declared. ‘My speech is finished. This, my body, I and the law now commit to your hands.’
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Aeschines was acquitted, but only barely, and the damage done to his reputation would be catastrophic. He would always retain the whiff of scandal, ending his career not as an elder statesman in Athens, but as a teacher of rhetoric on the island of Rhodes. Demosthenes would even succeed in mobilizing public opinion against Philip of Macedon, but support came far too late (assuming it would ever have made any real difference). Just as Demosthenes had desired, Athens and Macedonia joined battle and, at Chaeronea in 338 BC, Athens was crushed. In its aftermath, Philip established the League of Corinth, a pan-Hellenic league of mutual defence almost entirely dominated by Macedonian interests.
The trials of Timarchus and Aeschines were rather parochial affairs, but they intersected with momentous political events. Philip of Macedon, whose ascendancy was the catalyst for the whole affair, died two years after the battle of Chaeronea. His achievement was secure and Macedonia was now the greatest power in Greece. His son, Alexander, would extend that influence across much of the known world and, as skilled a warrior as he was, Alexander also knew the value of a diplomatic flourish. The insular relations of the Greek city states were shortly to give way to ambassadorial encounters with the rest of the world that were as epochal as any that had yet been produced – epochal if, on occasion, boozy.
CHAPTER II Greeks and Indika (#ulink_cb26c96d-7464-50bb-a480-da30a0308ee3)
i. Alexander
A prodigious tolerance for drink was always among the most useful of ambassadorial qualities. Writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Prussian monarch Frederick the Great offered unvarnished advice to anyone hoping to serve as an ambassador in London. He ought to be a ‘good debauchee who should preferably be able to drink wine better than the English and who, having drunk, would say nothing that should be kept quiet’.
Drinking wine better than the English was no easy feat. During a trip to Hanover in the winter of 1716, James Stanhope, Secretary of State to George I, served no less than seventy bottles of wine to thirteen diplomatic dinner guests. At the end of the evening everyone but Stanhope – and he had certainly consumed his share – was hopelessly drunk. Stanhope left his guests to sleep off their excesses and went to compare notes with Cardinal Dubois, representative of the French child-king Louis XV, who had been listening to the revelatory table talk from across the hall.
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Those with less robust livers risked moments of indiscretion and humiliation. In 1673, the French jeweller Jean Chardin attended a banquet at the Persian court in Isfahan. If he was impressed by the food – ‘a collation of fruits, both green and dried, and all sorts of sweet meats, wet and dry’ – he was dazzled by the alcohol on display. Lavish flat-bottomed cups, each able to carry three litres of wine, were filled from fifty golden flagons, some enamelled, others encrusted with jewels and pearls. It all left Chardin with the feeling that ‘no other part of the world can afford anything more magnificent and rich or more splendid and bright’. Impressed as he was, Chardin was also confused. None of the ambassadors present at the dinner seemed to be partaking of the wine, and while the Muscovite ambassador could be seen drinking, it was only from his private cache of Russian brandy. A nobleman at the dinner supplied Chardin with an explanation.
At a banquet ten years earlier, he revealed, two Russian ambassadors had drunk ‘so excessively that they quite lost their senses’. Unfortunately, the shah had then proposed a toast to the tsar, an honour that the ambassadors could hardly refuse. The two men took long draughts from their massive cups but one of them, ‘not being able to digest so much wine, had a pressing inclination to vomit, and not knowing where to disembogue, he took his great sable cap, which he half filled’.
His colleague was mortified by ‘so foul an action done in the presence of the king of Persia’ and urged him to leave the banqueting hall at once. Instead, ‘not knowing either what was said to him nor what he himself did’, he ‘clapped his cap upon his head, which presently covered him all over with nastiness’. Mercifully, the shah and his retinue were not offended, but ‘broke into a loud laughter, which lasted about half an hour, during which time the companions of the filthy Muscovite were forcing him by dint of blows with their fists to rise and go out’.
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Not that the debauched diplomatic banquet was an invention of the modern era. In 327 BC Alexander the Great, heir to the man Demosthenes had so despised, crossed into India. Some cowered at his advance; some resisted it; still others accepted it as inevitable. After suffering a humiliating defeat, two Indian kings decided to send a hundred envoys to offer their submission to the Greek invasion. ‘They all rode in chariots and were men of uncommon stature and of a very dignified bearing,’ the historian Curtius Rufus reports. In their gold and purple embroidered robes, they humbly offered Alexander ‘themselves, their cities, and their territories’.
Alexander eagerly accepted and, in celebration, ‘gave orders for the preparation of a splendid banquet, to which he invited the ambassadors and the petty kings of the neighbouring tribes’. Tapestry curtains, ‘which glittered with gold and purple’, surrounded a hundred gilded couches. It was a majestic spectacle, one more demonstration of Macedonian paramountcy. Until, that is, the alcohol intervened.
An Athenian boxer named Dioxippus was a guest at the festivities. Unfortunately, a Macedonian called Horratus was there too. ‘Flown with wine’, he began to taunt Dioxippus ‘and challenged him, if he were a man, to fight him next day with a sword’. The challenge was gleefully accepted and Alexander, ‘finding next day that the two men were more than ever bent on fighting…allowed them do as they pleased’.
Horratus arrived in full gladiatorial regalia, ‘carrying in his left hand a brazen shield…and in his right a javelin’, with a sword by his side for good measure. Dioxippus carried nothing but a scarlet cloak and a ‘stout knotty club’. To the large crowds that had gathered, ‘it seemed not temerity but downright madness for a naked man to engage with one armed to the teeth.’ They were mistaken.
Horratus launched his javelin, but Dioxippus evaded it ‘by a slight bending of his body’ and proceeded to break Horratus’s long pike with a single blow of his club. Next, he tripped Horratus, snatched his sword and ‘planted his foot on his neck as he lay prostrate’. Only Alexander’s intervention prevented Dioxippus from smashing his challenger’s skull. It was a huge disappointment for the assembled Macedonians, and they set about plotting their revenge. At another feast a few days later, they falsely accused Dioxippus of stealing a precious golden cup. He blushed at the suggestion, since ‘it often enough happens that one who blushes at a false insinuation has less control of his countenance than one who is really guilty.’ A proud man, Dioxippus ‘could not bear the glances which were turned upon him as if he were a thief’, so he quit the banquet, wrote a letter of farewell to Alexander, and fell on his sword.
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Such unseemly events could hardly have impressed the envoys of the Indian kings, and Macedonian pride was doubtless bruised, but a brief moment of humiliation could not mar Alexander’s spectacular achievements. He had quashed residual Greek resentment (even daring to raze the city of Thebes to the ground), conquered Persia, and by the time of his death at the age of thirty-two he had carved out an empire that stretched from the Danube, through Egypt, to the mouth of the Indus River. The pilgrimage he had reputedly made to Troy, to place wreaths on the tombs of the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus, now seemed less like hubris and more like a fitting prelude to a glorious military career.
Redoubtable soldier that he was, Alexander had always honoured diplomacy and had treated its officers with great respect. As a young man he had received a party of Persian ambassadors and had been so affable, and had asked them such pertinent questions, that they thought the much-vaunted abilities of his father Philip were as nothing in comparison with the precocious talents of his son. Years later, the envoys of some other defeated Indian towns visited Alexander to offer their submission. They were surprised to find him still in his armour and without anyone waiting in attendance upon him. At length, a cushion was brought in so that Alexander might rest his battle-wearied body. Instead, he made the eldest of the ambassadors take it and sit down upon it. Delighted by such courtesy, the envoys readily agreed to the terms of surrender that were proposed. Alexander could, as the occasion required, feast, charm or flatter all and any ambassadors.
He had won his empire through a combination of military prowess and diplomatic politesse. The empire was as fragile as it was vast, however. When he died, Alexander’s relatives, counsellors and generals squabbled over his inheritance and a series of smaller Macedonian states sprang up. The easternmost of these was centred on Syria and Persia, where one of Alexander’s most successful generals, Seleucus Nicator (358–281 BC), established a dynasty that would survive until the Roman invasion in 64 BC. Seleucus dreamed of emulating Alexander’s military forays into northern India. Unfortunately, in the period since Alexander’s death a formidable new power had arisen in that region.
ii. Megasthenes
The Mauryan Empire does not enjoy the place it deserves in the popular historical imagination. Between 321 and 180 BC, the Mauryans ruled over 500 million people, easily matching the grandeur of either the Moghul Empire or the British Raj. By the fifth century BC the numerous tribal groups of India had been reduced to four dominant monarchies, or mahajanpadas, who set about battling for primacy. By the beginning of the fourth century BC. the kingdom of Magadha, with its capital at Pataliputra, had emerged victorious. In the wake of Alexander’s military adventures in India, Chandragupta Maurya ascended to the Magadhan throne and, along with his successors, established the first genuine Indian empire, ranging from the borders of Persia to those of Afghanistan and Bengal.
Pataliputra (on the site of present-day Patna) was likely the largest city in the world at the time. Surrounded by 570 towers and a 900-foot moat, it boasted elegant houses, ponds and orchards, plentiful food and hardly any crime. With an army of 3,000 cavalry, 9,000 war elephants and 600,000 foot soldiers, the Mauryans were fully equipped to repulse any Greek invasion. Seleucus realized that his plans to conquer India were stillborn. After suffering military defeat in 305 BC, he instead made a treaty with the Mauryans, abandoning claims to the Punjab in exchange for several hundred battle elephants. With the prospect of hostilities averted, diplomacy was able to flourish.
In 302 BC a Macedonian ambassador named Megasthenes was sent to formalize relations between two civilizations recently at war. He travelled down the Kabul Valley, over the Khyber Pass, and headed across the Ganges Valley towards the Mauryan capital. He would stay there for ten years. While the workaday detail of his diplomatic encounters has vanished, the reports he took home would define the West’s understanding of India for centuries to come, and would be endlessly cited, if not always uncritically, in the works of historians and scholars like Arrian and Pliny. India was suddenly more tangible: a land ‘of such vast extent, it seems well-nigh to embrace the whole of the northern tropic zone of the earth’. It had ‘many huge mountains which abound in fruit trees of every kind, and vast plains of great fertility’.
The Indian people were not hapless savages but, ‘distinguished by their proud bearing’, were ‘well skilled in the arts, as might be expected of men who inhale a pure air and drink the very finest water’. They were generally frugal, but entirely capable of appreciating finery, favouring robes ‘ornamented with precious stones’ and ‘flowered garments made of the finest muslin’. They had ‘a high regard for beauty, and avail themselves of every device to improve their looks’.
There was much to admire in Mauryan culture. Even during military campaigns, those who worked the land were left unmolested, ensuring a steady supply of food. There were no slaves anywhere in the empire and visitors like Megasthenes were guaranteed courteous treatment: ‘officers are appointed even for foreigners whose duty is to see that no foreigner is wronged. Should any of them lose his health, they send physicians to attend him…and if he dies they bury him, and deliver over such property as he leaves to his relatives. The judges also decide cases in which foreigners are concerned, with the greatest care, and come down sharply on those who take unfair advantage of them.’
The sophistication of Indian thought was perhaps the greatest revelation. ‘Truth and virtue they hold alike in esteem. Hence they accord no special privileges to the old unless they possess superior wisdom.’ Death was ‘a very frequent subject of discourse. They regard this life as, so to speak, the time when the child within the womb becomes mature, and death as a birth into a real and happy life for the votaries of philosophy.’ And when the old finally passed on, the Indians did not raise monuments in their honour but considered ‘the virtues which men have displayed in life, and the songs in which their praises are celebrated, sufficient to preserve their memory after death’.
Like so many later visitors, Megasthenes was especially fascinated by Brahmin priests, men who ‘abstain from animal food and sexual pleasures, and spend their time in listening to serious discourse, and in imparting their knowledge to such as will listen to them’. They were much revered, and any man who came to listen to their discussions was ‘not allowed to speak, or even to cough, and much less to spit, and if he offends in any of these ways he is cast out from their society that very day, as being a man who is wanting in self-restraint’.
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Megasthenes’ epic survey of Indian life, his Indika, did not survive antiquity intact. All that remain are fragments and the countless references to his work by later authors. His influence was profound, though not uncontroversial. Megasthenes would be criticized for his inaccuracies and wilder speculations. Unversed in Indian languages, he only ever heard stories and reports in presumably imperfect translation. He certainly made gross generalizations about a society made up of hundreds of millions of people, and gave too much credence to the more fabulous stories he heard. He told the Greek world about races of Indians who lacked noses, others whose feet pointed backwards, and still others who had heads like dogs and communicated by barking. He spoke of ants that were the size of foxes, which dug for gold, and of bizarre flying serpents.
All such legends died hard. But Megasthenes also provided accurate accounts of Indian political and social life, Indian philosophy, the Indian judiciary, the Indian diet of rice and richly spiced meat, and he depicted a mighty city about which almost nothing had previously been known. His description of the Indian caste system was flawed – he mistakenly divided society into seven rather than four groups – but the truly momentous thing was that he introduced the West to this hierarchy for the very first time. Ultimately, it did not matter how good or bad his narrative was – although, on balance, it was remarkably good. The justified carping of some critics aside, it was believed, and one civilization’s understanding of another was forever transformed. India was suddenly far more than the mysterious place from which an occasional parrot arrived.
Greek diplomacy was capable of outreach. Far more so, in fact, than its Roman equivalent. On the face of things, the ancient Roman worldview was unapologetically inclusive. Yes, Roman legions might tramp across most of the known world, but in due course conquered peoples would be exposed to the cultural and economic blessings of Roman civilization. The conquered, more often than not, could even aspire to Roman citizenship. Rome’s lawyers had seemingly developed a code of international encounter that defined the procedures for waging war and making peace – the only good war was a just war.
All of this was true, but it hardly dampened Roman superiority and xenophobia. Diplomacy existed solely to expand the sphere of Roman influence. It did have much in common with its Greek counterpart. There was no specialized branch of government dedicated to foreign affairs, and ambassadors were chosen as the need arose, usually from the senatorial class. Like their Greek peers, they were given specific instructions and discouraged from showing undue initiative, and any agreements they reached had to be ratified by politicians back in Rome before coming into effect. Clearly, with such a vast empire, Rome was obliged to despatch many ambassadors, whether to seek alliances, to mediate disputes or to deal with administrative problems. Sometimes, in the field, an emperor such as Marcus Aurelius even conducted his own negotiations.
Ultimately, though, Roman diplomacy was ruthlessly straightforward. There were two preferred ways to deal with enemies and rivals. Ideally, they were to be terrified into submission, either through war or the threat of war. Alternatively, they could be bribed. The notion of cautious, respectful negotiation was often frowned upon. Diplomacy, by many accounts, was the poor, even dishonourable, relation to military conquest, the refuge of the weak emperor. In March 218, as one example among many, the senator Fabius Buteo and four other legates travelled to Carthage in North Africa. They announced that either Hannibal and his counsellors were to be handed over or Rome and Carthage would be in a state of war. They avoided all discussion or negotiation and, when the Carthaginians refused to comply with the Roman demands, they blithely announced that the Second Punic War had now begun. Buteo ‘let war fall from his toga’
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And if there had to be diplomacy, if a foreign nation or tribe had something urgent to relate, the onus was on them to initiate proceedings. In the accounts of his military campaigns in Gaul, Julius Caesar makes few references to the despatching of Roman ambassadors: rather, we are told of foreign envoys, often weeping and prostrated, coming to the Roman camp. Foreign ambassadors, the bearers of congratulations, condolences, requests or apologies, were expected to come to Rome, not vice versa. When the senate was in session, there were regularly hundreds of envoys in the capital, the most illustrious among them being housed and fed, at the state’s expense, in the Villa Publica.
Roman rulers took the number of envoys they received as an index of their prestige and power. Ambassadors from Germany, North Africa and Greece were unexceptional. More noteworthy were the princes who acted as their own representatives – as when Tiridates of Armenia visited Nero to receive his crown from the emperor’s own hands. The exotic ambassador was yet more desirable. If envoys came from as far away as Ceylon, as happened in the reign of Claudius, this was a sure indication of an emperor’s extraordinary fame.
The Roman view of the ambassador’s role lacked nuance. It did not make for the inquisitive, scholarly ambassador. For the most part, while Greece was busy with the inter-state rivalries of Athens, Thebes and Sparta, neither did the Greek notion of diplomacy. But in the person of Megasthenes, at least, a moment of genuine, lasting cultural dialogue had been achieved.
The Greeks were bemused by just how advanced and cultured Indian society seemed. Megasthenes was particularly impressed by its bureaucracy, by the number and quality of officials who oversaw a staggering range of domestic tasks. There was more to the Mauryan genius than this, however. Any fledgling empire, however exuberant, was obliged to look beyond its borders, to potential allies and likely adversaries. History in the West will always flatter classical Greece, but classical India had begun to hone its own ambassadorial skills and to meditate on the nature and ends of diplomacy. Mauryan civilization reached conclusions about its place in the world that were as startling as they were brilliant. Enter Kautilya.
CHAPTER III A Sanskrit Machiavelli (#ulink_71fa0d7c-52d5-5f4f-90d7-b7dd3d6f9dac)
i. Debating Diplomacy
Thus speaks the Beloved of the Gods: Dhamma is good. And what is Dhamma? It is having few faults and many good deeds, mercy, charity, truthfulness, and purity. I have given the gift of insight in various forms. I have conferred many benefits on man, animals, birds, and fish, even to saving their lives, and I have done many other commendable deeds. I have had this inscription of Dhamma engraved that men may conform to it and that it may endure. He who conforms will do well.
Second Pillar Edict of the Mauryan King Asoka
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Asoka, Beloved of the Gods, was the greatest of the Mauryan emperors. His reign (273–232 BC) began with a string of bloody military campaigns but, tortured by pity for the fallen and displaced, he renounced martial glory and took to the peaceful, reflective path of Buddhism. Legend tells of the Buddhist monk Nigrodha who went strolling in the gardens of the royal palace one day and enchanted Asoka with his calm, almost beatific demeanour. Everyone else struck Asoka as being confused in mind, like perturbed deer, but the monk seemed utterly at ease, perhaps possessed of some wondrous transcendent vision. The emperor invited the monk into his palace and listened to his account of a Buddhist faith that, after his conversion in c.260 BC, Asoka would help to spread across the region.
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He decreed that a series of edicts should be promulgated across his dominions, as far as present-day Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan. Sometimes etched on rock faces, sometimes on towering pillars, these inscriptions proclaimed Asoka’s dedication to a life of virtue, his dream that he, ‘his sons, his grandsons and his great grandsons will advance the practice of Dhamma until the end of the world’.
It was a benign vision. Charities, hospitals and veterinary clinics were to be established, prisoners were to be treated more decently, and even the lot of dumb animals was to be improved: ‘formerly in the kitchens [of Asoka], many hundreds of thousands of living animals were killed daily for meat. But now, at the time of writing this inscription, only three animals are killed, two peacocks and a deer, and the deer not invariably. Even these animals will not be killed in the future.’ The edicts spoke of imperial officers who were to tour the countryside every five years to instruct people in the laws of piety, urging them to honour their parents and friends, to live frugally, and to maintain a bare minimum of personal property. Earlier kings might have indulged in endless ‘pleasure tours, consisting of hunts and similar amusements’, but Asoka would only travel in order to meet his people, to talk to the elderly, discourse with Brahmin priests and distribute gifts.
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The rock-and-pillar edicts were tools of propaganda, and we might question whether Asoka was quite as saintly as he wished history to believe. That he was enlightened and, by the standards of the time, compassionate cannot be doubted, however. He claimed that his task was to ‘promote the welfare of the whole world’, and so he did. He abolished the death penalty, established a sprawling network of wells and rest houses for travellers, and planted shady trees along trade routes. As for ambassadors, they were to continue in their usual tasks – forging alliances and seeking tribute – but they were also to carry medicinal herbs to foreign lands.
